We seek for God outside our lives in the world. We treat the world as something inferior and separate, something to be dismissed or abandoned if we want to find God. The devotee gives up his life in the world, is told to leave friends, family and worldly activities behind to focus on God-realisation. We observe the forms and forces in the world and treat them as if they are an obstacle to our devotion. Sri Aurobindo takes a different approach however. For him, the entire world, the entire universal manifestation is the face of God, the forms of God, the manifested becoming of God. The devotee can find God everywhere, in all things, in all events, in all beings. This opens up the secret of universal love and Ananda for the integral devotee.
“All Nature and all life will be to him at once a revelation and a fine trysting-place. Intellectual and aesthetic and dynamic activities, science and philosophy and life, thought and art and action will assume for him a diviner sanction and a greater meaning. He will seek them because of his clear sight of the Divine through them and because of the delight of the Divine in them.”
“The general power of Delight is love and the special mould which the joy of love takes is the vision of beauty. The God-lover is the universal lover and he embraces the All-blissful and All-beautiful. When universal love has seized on his heart, it is the decisive sign that the Divine has taken possession of him; and when he has the vision of the All-beautiful everywhere and can feel at all times the bliss of his embrace, that is the decisive sign that he has taken possession of the Divine. Union is the consummation of love, but it is this mutual possession that gives it at once the acme and the largest reach of its intensity. It is the foundation of oneness in ecstasy.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part Three: The Yoga of Divine Love, Chapter 6, The Delight of the Divine, pg. 566
Sri Aurobindo Studies 